SharePoint Online Weekly Update — October 12, 2026

Copilot in SharePoint Reaches General Availability

Microsoft announced that Copilot in SharePoint began rolling out as generally available on September 30, 2026, as covered in its October "What's new" post on the SharePoint Tech Community blog. The capability continues to move beyond answering questions about a single site and into workflow-oriented tasks, and Microsoft is steadily consolidating AI authoring features under the Copilot in SharePoint name.

One visible consequence is a change to FAQ web part authoring. AI-generated FAQ creation is moving from the web part itself into Copilot in SharePoint in October 2026. Existing FAQ content continues to work, so this is an authoring-experience change rather than a content migration. Also, per the Microsoft 365 end-of-support tracker, the SharePoint Page Agent (Frontier) is retiring in mid-October 2026, with Copilot in SharePoint named as the replacement for creating pages and news posts.

Because rollout is gradual, tenants will see the experience at different times. Now is a good moment to decide who gets access, what content Copilot should be grounded on, and how you will teach people to prompt it well.

What to do: Confirm Copilot licensing and rollout status for your pilot group, tell authors who used the Page Agent or the FAQ web part's AI option that the workflow is changing, and write a short prompting guide for page and news creation.

Retirements Landing This Month and Into 2027

Several SharePoint retirements are converging. SharePoint one-time passcode (OTP) authentication for external sharing is being retired in October 2026, with external access moving to Microsoft Entra B2B. Guests who rely on OTP without a matching guest account may be denied access, which is the sort of issue that surfaces as a flurry of help desk tickets from partners and customers.

Further out, standalone SharePoint Online Plan 1 and Plan 2 reach end of life in January 2027, with renewals no longer permitted though existing subscriptions run to expiry. Restricted SharePoint Search is fully retired on January 31, 2027, and existing configurations are not migrated automatically to Restricted Content Discovery. Classic publishing site and page creation is disabled from March 1, 2027, and classic user-created pages become read-only on October 1, 2028. Entra ID-registered Remote Event Receivers stop working on July 1, 2027 (Azure ACS-registered receivers already stopped on April 2, 2026).

What to do: Inventory external sharing that depends on one-time passcodes and invite those guests through Entra B2B before the cutoff. Separately, if you use Restricted SharePoint Search, plan your move to Restricted Content Discovery now, and scan for classic publishing sites and remote event receivers.

Redesigned SharePoint Mobile App Heads to GA

Microsoft added a redesigned SharePoint mobile app to the Microsoft 365 roadmap (RM571200) on September 16, targeting general availability in October 2026 on iOS and Android, across Worldwide, GCC, GCC High, and DoD clouds. Its home becomes a personalized Discover view blending files, sites, people, and news, replacing the separate Find, News, and Me tabs. Also planned are better site browsing, in-app file previews, refreshed news and search, dark mode, and performance improvements.

Microsoft has announced no admin controls, so the change will arrive through normal app updates. Global navigation menus for SharePoint sites are not supported in the mobile app, so mobile users will not see your hub or global navigation. Dark mode may also expose logos or icons with transparent backgrounds that become hard to read.

What to do: Add quick links to key tasks near the top of important home pages, review news posts for clear titles, thumbnails, and audience targeting, test logos in dark mode, and update any help content that references the Find, News, and Me tabs. Validate file previews against your sensitivity label and Conditional Access setup once the update reaches you.

SharePoint Framework: SPFx 1.24 and Copilot UX Components

The September SPFx roadmap update says SPFx 1.24 Beta 5 shipped on September 23, adding a public preview refresh of Copilot UX components (previously called SharePoint Copilot Apps, then Copilot Components), React 18 support, and fixes from earlier betas. A release candidate comes next, with general availability targeted for October 2026. SPFx 1.24 is expected to make React 18.x the default for new solutions and to add Node.js 24 and 26 support, build-time validation of declarative agent manifests, and scaffolding with declarative agent manifest v1.8.

Looking ahead, SPFx 1.25 (December 2026 or January 2027) is planned to bring the SPFx CLI to GA, replacing the Yeoman generator, plus navigation customizers that let components override navigation nodes. Microsoft lists licensing for Copilot UX components at GA as still to be confirmed, so budget questions remain open.

What to do: Developers should try 1.24 beta builds in a non-production branch, check dependencies against React 18, and plan their toolchain move from Yeoman to the SPFx CLI. Hold commitments to Copilot UX components until licensing is clarified.

Admin Center, Governance, and Security Updates

Recent admin-center changes continue to focus on oversharing and governance. A new "Everyone except external users" report gives item-level visibility into permissions granted via Everyone groups across SharePoint and OneDrive, without changing existing permissions, which is a useful first step before a Copilot rollout. Viva Connections multi-home administration is moving from the Microsoft 365 admin center to the SharePoint admin center, and a new Remove-SPOFontFile cmdlet lets admins delete unwanted brand fonts.

On the compliance side, Purview auto-labeling capacity for SharePoint and OneDrive rises from 100,000 to 500,000 files per tenant per day, with general availability expected in October 2026. Starting October 5, OneDrive sync excludes .db-wal files by default. Power Automate owners should also note that SharePoint thumbnail actions now return an image rather than a URL, which can break flows that depend on the URL.

What to do: Run the Everyone-except-external-users report and remediate overshared libraries, review Purview auto-labeling policies to take advantage of the higher capacity, and audit Power Automate flows that use SharePoint thumbnail actions.

Sources

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